Goals
More about SensiBlend
Unique workshop in terms of format and objectives, as compared to traditional workshops
SensiBlend is both a meta-workshop and a living experiment. As a meta-workshop, it seeks to scrutinize the future of remote, hybrid, and blended experiences within professional and social contexts—not just limited to interpersonal interactions at work or beyond, but also extending to forums, workshops, and conferences—and how they interact with tools and spaces. As a living experiment involving the attendees of the workshop, we aim to employ novel remote-working tools and participatory sensing of attendees’ physical and physiological attributes, to elicit potential routes of augmenting social practices in a discourse about the future of remote working, learning, and living. We will employ the policy of ‘BYODS’ – i.e. bring your own devices and sensors, to gather blended experiences during the workshop. The diverse and rich data collected during the workshop about attendees’ perceptions and experiences will be a valuable resource for future analysis (done collaboratively with all the participants), and importantly, an evidence-based repertoire of blended experiences and ground-truths to design novel technological interventions as well as to guide the agenda for future discourses and research.
We aim SensiBlend to be an interdisciplinary forum that brings together researchers and practitioners from academia and industry. We expect participants from the domains of Ubiquitous Computing, HCI, ICMI, CSCW, but also from the disciplines of Industrial Design, Social Cognition, Architecture, and Urban Sciences. In particular, the goal of this workshop is to collaboratively:
Assess the evolving socio-technical themes, concerns, and unanswered questions in relation to remote and rather isolated interpersonal and professional interactions, followed by developing them into clusters which are shared and critiqued among workshop attendees
Depict the space of design possibilities in terms of technological and environmental interventions.
Envision new sensing and data-acquisition paradigms to responsibly and accurately gather physical, physiological, and experiential qualities.
Explore novel and hybrid methods for experimentation “in- the-wild” which are adapted to blended experiences.
Initiate discourse around the future of “blended social” and co-create research agenda(s) for meaningfully addressing it.
Consolidate an international network of researchers to further develop these research agendas through funding proposals and through steering future funding instruments.